08/27/19 Patch : Dominator Secondary buffs, snipe changes

[lobster]

For Dominator specific discussion of the patch changes:

Powers: Snipes

• Dominator Snipes
  • 20 second recharge and 18.512 end cost.
  • Base 2.67 scale damage in their "quick" form, down from 3.56 scale.
  • Every point of ToHit buffing the player has will increase or decrease this damage, up to a cap of 3.56 scale damage with +22% ToHit buff.
  • Slow form will do 4.5 scale damage.
•  

Powers: Dominator Assault Sets

• Earth Assault
  • Power Boost is now Power Up. (90s recharge, +34% damage, +75% str to other effects for 10 seconds.)
  • Stone Spears: Cast time reduced from 2.10 seconds to 1.00 second.
  • Tremor: Cast time reduced from 3.30 to 2.50 seconds.
  • Hurl Boulder: Cast time reduced from 2.50 seconds to 1.50 second. Recharge increased from 8 seconds to 12 seconds. Damage increased from 86.64 to 120.5 damage.
  • Heavy Mallet: Recharge increased from 12 to 14 seconds. Damage increased from 133.1 to 151.8 damage.
  • Mud Pots: Increased radius to 15ft. Lowered endurance cost slightly. Damage lowered from scale 0.18 per tick to 0.13 per tick
• Electricity Assault:
  • Thunder Strike: Cast time lowered to 2.5 seconds. Now knocks enemies down. ST and AoE Damage increased.
• Energy Assault
  • Power Boost is now Power Up. (90s recharge, +34% damage, +75% str to other effects for 10 seconds.)
  • Total Focus: Cast time shortened from 3.30 to 2.50 seconds.
  • Power Burst: Cast time shortened from 2.00 to 1.67 seconds.
  • New special mechanic. Most single target attacks have a 20% chance of granting Energy Focus mode. Hitting a foe with Total Focus will always grant Energy Focus mode.
  • While in this mode, Whirling Hands will inflict a large amount of bonus damage. Power Burst will do some bonus damage.
  • The mode will be removed if a power with bonus is used.
• Icy Assault
  • Power Boost is now Power Up. (90s recharge, +34% damage, +75% str to other effects for 10 seconds.)
  • Ice Bolt: Recharge increased from 4 seconds to 5 seconds. Damage increased from 52.9 to 61.3 damage.
  • Ice Sword: Recharge increased from 8 seconds to 10 seconds. Damage increased from 95.8 to 114.5 damage.
  • Ice Slash: Recharge increased from 10 to 17 seconds. Damage increased from 114.5 to 179.8 damage.
  • Chilling Embrace: increased radius to 15ft. Added -10% damage str to affected enemies. Power now deals cold damage every 2 seconds to foes that are not under the Sleep status effect. Slightly lowered the speed movement debuff.
• Martial Assault
  • Envenomed Blades: Fixed a bug where this power would sometimes proc more than once. Procs now ignores damage buffs and enhancements.
  • Thunder Kick: Recharge lowered from 8 seconds to 7 seconds. Damage lowered from 95.8 to 86.4 damage.
  • Trick Shot is now a proper chain attack, hits up to 5 targets. Damage lowered from scale 1.4 to scale 1.1
  • Spinning Kick: Recharge increased to 10 seconds. Target cap reduced to 5, same as all other melee cones. This power was also doing Single Target damage despite it being a cone. This has been fixed but recharge increase should keep damage decent.
  • Dragon's Tail: Recharge reduced from 20 seconds to 16. Damage scale from 1.1 to 0.8985.
  • Explosive Shuriken should no longer state it's an AoE, but still will do splash fire dot damage to foes around the main target.
• Psionic Assault
  • Psionic Dart: Cast time reduced from 1.33 to 0.83 seconds.
  • Telekinetic Thrust: Cast time reduced from 2.07 to 1.00 seconds. Recharge lowered from 8 seconds to 7 seconds. Damage lowerd from 95.8 to 86.4.
• Radioactive Assault
  • Contaiminated Strike: Recharge increased from 5 seconds to 8 seconds. Damage increased from 67.7 to 95.7 damage.
  • X-Ray Beam: Recharge from 10 seconds to 11 seconds. Damage increased from 103.5 to 112.0 damage.
  • Devastating Blow: Recharge 18 seconds to 20 seconds. Damage increased from 189.2 to 207.9
  • Devastating Blow and Atom Smasher now accept Dominator ATOs.
• Savage Assault
  • Vicious Slash: Recharge increased from 9 seconds to 11 seconds. Damage increased from 105.1 to 123.8 damage.
  • Call Hawk: Recharge increased from 12 seconds to 14 seconds. Damage increased accordingly (variable damage.)
  • Feral Charge: Target cap lowered to 5.
• Thorny Assault
  • Aim replaced with Build Up.
  • Thorny Darts: Recharge time increased from 3 to 4 seconds. Damage increased from 44.4 lethal to 52.8 lethal.
  • Skewer: Cast time reduced from 1.63 seconds to 0.83 seconds. Recharge time lowered from 10 seconds to 6 seconds. Damage lowered from 114.45 to 77.1 damage. Chance for DoT increased from 80% to 85%.
  • Impale: Cast time reduced from 2.43 seconds to 1.43 seconds. Recharge increased from 8 to 10 seconds. Damage increased from 86.6 to 103.5 damage.
  • Flling Thorns: Lowered recharge to 10 seconds. Scale to 40.9 lethal damage and 4.5 toxic damage over time.
  • Ripper: Recharge increased from 13  to 15 seconds, arc lowered to 60 degrees. Damage increased to 136.5 lethal damage.
  • Thorn Barrage: Recharge time increased from  11 to 18 seconds. Damage increased to 42.8 lethal damage per tick.

 

EDIT: Copied in updated patch notes.

 

Edited August 28, 2019 by lobster

[lobster]

I tested /energy and /icy on Justin a bit during the beta period and was pretty happy  with the changes.  We are getting stronger across the board.  Whether or not that's a net positive is hard to say right now.  Yes almost everything will "feel better" to play, but will it put as above other ATs where we shouldn't be?  Dunno, let's find out!

 

I'm not super happy about the fact that Chilling Embrace is now a weird exception style pbaoe - I would have preferred it not doing any damage to being the one damage aura that is weird HOWEVER, I'm selfishly happy that, if it was going to get damage, it doesn't mess up the elec/icy playstyle.   However, this seems to imply that it should be a "special" for dominator damage auras (and maybe controller stuff like hot feet),  since any of them might be used with an aoe sleep power as well.

Snipes hit hard.  With ONLY 6% tohit from the proc IO, the energy insta-snipe was hitting about the same as the T9 blast.  That's a pretty big damage boost across the board.  To the point where I think it might actually be too much.  Sets typically only have 1 big range blast for a reason.  Hopefully the DPA #s are low enough to keep it from being OP?   Something like 75-80% of a heavy blast would have been fine, then maybe scaling up to full T9 strength at 22% tohit, or whatever the magic # is.

Earth, Energy, Rad, Thorny and Icy got some really solid buffs, hopefully bringing them into line with psi, martial and fire without going overboard.

Edited August 27, 2019 by lobster

[Planerunner]

Quote

Envenomed Blades: Fixed a bug where this power would sometimes proc more than once. Procs now ignores damage buffs and enhancements.

That's a big deal for martial doms. Envenomed Blades is a powerful ability (some would say almost, ALMOST a required one). And it was due to a BUG . . . . ugh. Not only that, nerfed to ignore damage buffs and enhancements? Not good. 

[Deelon]

18 minutes ago, Planerunner said:

That's a big deal for martial doms. Envenomed Blades is a powerful ability (some would say almost, ALMOST a required one). And it was due to a BUG . . . . ugh. Not only that, nerfed to ignore damage buffs and enhancements? Not good. 

Is anyone able to test out the changes? Hopefully it won’t be as bad as it sounds.

[lobster]

1 hour ago, Planerunner said:

That's a big deal for martial doms. Envenomed Blades is a powerful ability (some would say almost, ALMOST a required one). And it was due to a BUG . . . . ugh. Not only that, nerfed to ignore damage buffs and enhancements? Not good. 

It was required for best performance for a number of reasons...you wouldn't take /fiery without taking Embrace of Fire for similar reasons. 

When Score or whoever created EB, it looks like they copied the code over for Embrace of Fire, buffed it across the board, nerfed the damage, but forgot to flag it properly.  As it stands, it's basically an Embrace of Fire with the following changes :

• Toxic instead of fire damage
• 40s duration instead of 30s
• 160s recharge instead of 180s
• 12% tohit instead of ZERO - this is buffable and will boost your snipe damage!! 
• From a post I found on reddit, it looks like it was doing about 16% of total damage, instead of 16% of base [note : this low number makes the power make more sense to me now, including the uptime]. 

 

It looks like, while it might be a ~50% damage cut, the other #s still make this power solid.

Edited August 27, 2019 by lobster

[Frosticus]

hello earth assualt. meet forcefeedback proc. 

 

I mean you always could do that but faster cast times and longer recharges aplenty will translate to huge gains for that set via that proc. I'm excited. 

[Deelon]

3 hours ago, lobster said:

 

• From a post I found on reddit, it looks like it was doing about 16% of total damage, instead of 16% of base [note : this low number makes the power make more sense to me now, including the uptime]. 

 

It looks like, while it might be a ~50% damage cut, the other #s still make this power solid.

A permanent 16% scaling damage effect would be pretty busted. Especially when being affected by something like Fulcrum Shift.

 

At a base, the 50% decrease from ~32% damage to 16% isn’t really a huge difference. By no means a reason to stop playing the set. Sure you won’t be doing that extra bit of damage when your at the damage cap, but at that point your damage is high enough that it’s not the end of the world.

 

I’m too lazy too look up the dominator cap but let’s assume it’s somewhere around 500% including enhancements. 16% of that 500 is an 80% damage effect. 80-16=64% damage loss under extreme cases where you’re already dealing 516% damage.

[Caulderone]

9 hours ago, lobster said:

• Icy Assault
  • Power Boost is now Power Up. (90s recharge, +34% damage, +75% str to other effects for 10 seconds.)
  • Ice Bolt: Recharge increased from 4 seconds to 5 seconds. Damage increased from 52.9 to 61.3 damage.
  • Ice Sword: Recharge increased from 8 seconds to 10 seconds. Damage increased from 95.8 to 114.5 damage.
  • Ice Slash: Recharge increased from 10 to 20 seconds. Damage increased from 114.5 to 207.8 damage.
  • Chilling Embrace: increased radius to 15ft. Added -10% damage str to affected enemies. Power now deals cold damage every 2 seconds to foes that are not under the Sleep status effect. Slightly lowered the speed movement debuff.

 

You might want to recopy the patch notes and update the original post.  Some things were tweaked for missed patch notes.  For example, Ice Slash went to 17 seconds instead of 20.  It was originally upped to 20, but a follow up patch on Beta dropped it to 17, which is what went live.

 

[lobster]

5 hours ago, Caulderone said:

 

You might want to recopy the patch notes and update the original post.  Some things were tweaked for missed patch notes.  For example, Ice Slash went to 17 seconds instead of 20.  It was originally upped to 20, but a follow up patch on Beta dropped it to 17, which is what went live.

 

 

Done, thanks!

EDIT: I didn't have a ton of time to test tonight, but here's what I got:

 

 

• Martial
  • The damage from Envenomed Blades seems irregular.  It does around 9% of BASE damage on some simple powers, but way less on aoes, likely based on their expected target cap.  I'm not sure why that's necessary?  9% should be 9%.
  • I don't have any of the melee attacks on my grav/martial, but damage from the ranged attack still feels fine @ 36.   Once I hit 38, I'll have THREE heavy ranged attacks (including propel from grav).  This is one of the few doms I have/would build to be 100% at range.  I might try a melee /ma dom at some point to test those crazy DPA kicks.  I need a good idea first.
• Savage
  • Feral Charge: Target cap lowered to 5.    : Can we get the in game text to reflect that this is an aoe please?  These is no indication of aoe size.   And it should target targeted aoe or pbaoe instead of just melee sets?  Mids shows it taking pbaoe, but in game it shows 'melee damage'.
  • Damage feels fine.
• Earth
  • Like butter.   Rocky, kick ass butter.  I already loved Earth...now it's even more fun.  Mud pots stacking with most of my AA is great, the animations are smooth...my ice/earth is just a blast to play.  He was my first dom to 50 in HC.  Ice/ could use a little work, but ice/earth/mu in particular is solid.  I absolutely wanted to keep playing so I could smash stuff.
• Thorny
  • My fire/thorn is only 33, so I'm missing 2 of the attacks that got solid changes.  Will continue to level and test.  I will say that the one thing that feels awkward right now is the animation time on Thorn Burst.  I think the animation time would be easier to accept if it hit a bit harder...but I'd probably just prefer a faster animation  - it's still over 3 seconds.
• Energy
  • I need to respec into Whirling Hands
  • On second thought, I need to respect this character in general.   Will comment more when I have time to do that.

Edited August 28, 2019 by lobster

[Planerunner]

Quote

It does around 9% of BASE damage on some simple powers, but way less on aoes, likely based on their expected target cap.

Well that's not good. There's several builds for MA that involve ranged AoE. Hopefully this part of the nerf isn't too bad. I'm leveling a Plant/MA right now, not yet 20. I'll have to wait and see.

[ThrillMill]

13 hours ago, lobster said:

Earth

• Like butter.   Rocky, kick ass butter.  I already loved Earth...now it's even more fun.  Mud pots stacking with most of my AA is great, the animations are smooth...my ice/earth is just a blast to play.  He was my first dom to 50 in HC.  Ice/ could use a little work, but ice/earth/mu in particular is solid.  I absolutely wanted to keep playing so I could smash stuff.

For the love of all things holy and good, how are able to run both AA and Earth's end hungry attacks. I'm currently running a Fire/Earth/Soul (dat Soul Drain, ya know!) with 180% recharge, the Pancea, Numina and Miracle Procs in Health and the +End Performance Shift proc in Stamina and I can't go more than 2 runs of Seismic > HM > Mallet > Hurl Boulder with Hot Feet running without running out of blue! I want to add Mud Pots but there's just no way right now.  Maybe Cardiac Incarnate is the answer? 

 

[lobster]

1 hour ago, ThrillMill said:

For the love of all things holy and good, how are able to run both AA and Earth's end hungry attacks. I'm currently running a Fire/Earth/Soul (dat Soul Drain, ya know!) with 180% recharge, the Pancea, Numina and Miracle Procs in Health and the +End Performance Shift proc in Stamina and I can't go more than 2 runs of Seismic > HM > Mallet > Hurl Boulder with Hot Feet running without running out of blue! I want to add Mud Pots but there's just no way right now.  Maybe Cardiac Incarnate is the answer? 

 

Power Sink ftw.  I don't even think I have numina proc slotted yet.  I also have aid self with the new T3 that gives it bonus end (which is not recovery, but some weird delayed, +end), which I use rarely.

This one just hit 50, I don't think I have any incarnate stuff on him yet. I think I was running 2/2 and while yeah, my end bar drops, I do not have what I would consider "end issues".

 

[ThrillMill]

1 hour ago, lobster said:

 

Power Sink ftw.  I don't even think I have numina proc slotted yet.  I also have aid self with the new T3 that gives it bonus end (which is not recovery, but some weird delayed, +end), which I use rarely.

This one just hit 50, I don't think I have any incarnate stuff on him yet. I think I was running 2/2 and while yeah, my end bar drops, I do not have what I would consider "end issues".

 

Oh dear... Before I dip into the Elec Patron Pool I'll try the Cardiac route. Wish me luck, Dominator brethren. 

[lobster]

13 hours ago, ThrillMill said:

Oh dear... Before I dip into the Elec Patron Pool I'll try the Cardiac route. Wish me luck, Dominator brethren. 

I picked up T2 vigor and was able to stop using Power Sink entirely, so Cardiac should be fine.  Popped over to Soul Mastery for a bit to see how it feels with this combo.